Timesharing, or Vacation Ownership, is the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry. It has recently been the subject of feature articles in The Wall Street Journal, and other financial publications, as well as newspaper and magazine articles. Although timesharing has been around for about 50 years, it’s now gaining in popularity as more people learn about the great vacations, terrific destinations, luxurious resorts, and the money you can save by owning a timeshare!

The concept is simple and straightforward. Years ago, many families owned a cottage at the beach or a lodge in the mountains or on a lake, and they used it for their family vacations a couple or three weeks per year. It was fine, but the problem was they were paying for it for all 52 weeks of the year while only getting a few weeks use from it. Nice if you could afford it, but not an economical way to vacation. Plus, your family had to go to the same place, do the same things, see the same neighbors, eat in the same places, sit on the same beach or fish the same lake each year.

Timesharing solves all those problems! Timeshares are sold in increments of one week, and you may buy as many “weeks” as you want. You’ll also hear the term “intervals”, meaning an interval of one week. So if you want a one-week vacation each year, you buy a one-week timeshare for a nominal initial purchase price, and you own the use of it every year. Each year, you pay your resort a “maintenance fee”, which is your share of the operating expenses for the resort. You pay the fee for every week you own, but only for the number of weeks you own, not for all 52 weeks – so there’s your first savings! Maintenance fees vary from about $200 per year to maybe $1,000 per year, depending upon your resort’s operating budget and the number of owners available to help pay it.

Now, you probably just had this question pop into your mind: “Well, why wouldn’t I just rent the same place whenever I want to go there?” What you’ll find is (if the resort has rental weeks available at all) the rent will be 2-3 times the amount of the maintenance fee – so there’s your second savings!

There are other savings associated with timeshares too. For example, all timeshares have some form of kitchen facilities, most of them a full kitchen like you have at home, all fully-equipped with appliances, dishes, cookware, place settings, glassware, and everything you need to prepare your own meals if you so desire. So that’s your third savings – buying your food in the local supermarket is lots cheaper than eating out three meals a day. Of course, you may opt to split the day and do some of both. When we travel to timeshare resorts, we buy breakfast food, snacks and beverages for our kitchen, then eat out for lunch and dinner. But your own situation will tell you how you can best save on foods. There is also a saving in time, especially if you have kids. Think about it – what’s your day like when you have kids to feed? If you’re staying in a hotel with no kitchen facility, you have to dress them and go to the restaurant for breakfast, take them back to the room to put on their swim suits, down to the pool for a little while, back up to change into dry clothes to take them to lunch, back into the swim suits for the afternoon, back to change for dinner in another restaurant…and you spend half your vacation changing clothes and killing time in restaurants. But if you’re in a timeshare and have a kitchen, you can eat breakfast in your ‘jammies, go to the pool, return to your timeshare and have lunch in your swim suit, back to the pool, then maybe you change and go out to dinner. Much less hassle, much cheaper, not so much wasted time.

Did you ever get a rate quote from a hotel of $XX per night, per person? More people, more money, right? Well, timeshares you use per unit, and they don’t care how many people you are as long as you don’t exceed the maximum occupancy of the unit. Also, when you checked out of that hotel, maybe you learned there were extra taxes or service fees they “forgot” to tell you about in the rate quote. Timeshares generally don’t have those little surprises either – and that’s your fourth savings.

I just said timeshares “generally” don’t have hidden fees and taxes. But that’s not absolutely true. Sometimes there are extras. For example, you might be charged for things you would expect to pay for such as golf, spa treatments, or a massage – no surprises there. In some of the islands, they have recently started taxing timeshares. The Caribbean version of the “Gotcha!”, the government enacts a flat tax on every timeshare week, confident they can stick it to the tourists and have them pay it, then go home. It’s usually a small amount, maybe $5/day collected when you check out after your wonderful vacation, so you just pay it and get on the plane. Some places also charge for electricity, sometimes by metering your use and sometimes a flat fee per week. You’ll find this being done in some islands and Europe. It’s done for two reasons. First, electricity may be expensive in that location, and the fair way is to charge you according to how much you use. And second, it encourages you to turn off the air conditioning when you go out for the day to conserve.

Perhaps the most significant benefit of timesharing is the ability to trade your timeshare with other owners and go to thousands of resorts worldwide. You are not locked into taking the same vacation at the same time each year, like you were with your beach place or lodge at the lake. Some years, you may elect to go to your home resort (the resort where you own your timeshare), and other years you may want to do something different.

Timeshares enable you to do whatever you want for your vacation, whenever you want. For example, you might own a summer week on the beach and decide you want to go skiing in the winter in Colorado. Or maybe it’s time to take the kids to Disney World to see Mickey and his friends. You can do that!

There are two major corporations and several smaller companies that facilitate exchanges between owners of timeshares. The two major ones are called Resort Condominiums International, and Interval International, known by their initials RCI and II. RCI has over 3,700 affiliated resorts worldwide, and II has over 2,000. The smaller exchange companies do not require resort affiliates and operate on a much smaller scale, so we’ll confine this discussion to the two big guys, RCI and II.

The exchange company acts as a clearing house for timeshare exchanges, or “trades”, and as an owner you deal with the exchange company, not other owners. The exchange company is referred to as the “bank”. An exchange is a two-step process, and you don’t have to do both steps at the same time. You “deposit” your week in the “bank”, then request to “withdraw” a week deposited by someone else. If the exchange company has what you ask for, they make the trade and charge you a fee. The fee varies according to which company you’re exchanging through and whether you ask for a domestic destination or an international destination. The exchange company assumes the risk of finding someone else to use the week you deposited, and it never comes back to haunt you. The exchange company will confirm your trade in writing and notify the resort that you will be checking in instead of the actual owner, and you will have a document to show when you check-in to ensure there are no problems. It’s a pretty smooth process, and these two exchange companies process about 3.5 million exchanges every year, so they have it down pat!

There are certain nuances associated with the exchange process, and you need to understand them if you want to use the system to your best advantage. We discuss the exchange process in all its glory on another page of this web site. Other topics of interest concerning timeshares include buying a timeshare, selling a timeshare, exchanging your timeshare for a cruise, glossary of terms, timeshare weeks vs. points plans, tips for timeshare owners, and links to other timeshare sites. You can find pages on this web site dealing with all these topics.